Midnight in Paris (2011)

Directed by: Woody Allen | 94 minutes | comedy, romance | Actors: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Adrien Brody, Michael Sheen, Kathy Bates, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, Tom Hiddleston, Alison Pill, Léa Seydoux, Corey Stoll, Kurt Fuller, Gad Elmaleh, Mimi Kennedy

Gil Pender, of Pasadena, may be a successful screenwriter in Hollywood, but he’s missed his calling. The bread writer carries the cross of literary ambition with him. But how lucky that Gil gets to do that in a world created by Woody Allen. He is engaged to handsome, blond Inez (Rachel McAdams) and you can safely call his future in-laws well-to-do. Just before the wedding, the four spend a week in Paris at the expense of their father-in-law. In the world of Woody Allen you don’t lie awake in a noisy motel on the ring road, but you spend the night in a decorated marble paradise – the kind of hotel where the average tourist only takes pictures. In ‘Midnight in Paris’ all that is nevertheless just the starting point of life through the eyes of Gil Pender. Even the City of Light turns out to be able to transcend reality.

He may have a banal name, Gil is a romantic of the purest blood. When dark clouds gather over Paris, Gil immediately seizes the opportunity to stroll over Pont Royal in the rain. While Inez and mother-in-law open an umbrella. As a child of Woody Allen, his jackets are just a bit too loose and he prefers to wear beige pleated trousers. Clothes that proclaim that he is not so concerned with appearance. With Gil, it all happens in there, in that head of his. This is different with his Inez – who dutifully finishes the cultural highlights in Paris, but more eagerly finishes the flaghip stores of famous fashion houses. They would see laundromats and fluorescent lighting, where Gil sees the ghosts from ‘A Moveable Feast’, Hemingway’s ode to his journalistic boyhood in Paris.

Gil Pender is right up the alley of Owen Wilson. Together with that characteristic little spout of his, his dazed eyes betray a permanent, nostalgic wonder. As if he sees something that we don’t. All those other versions shine right through today’s Paris; that of the Revolution and the Bastille, of Baron de Hausmann and his star-shaped street plan, of the Fin de Siècle and, above all, of the 1920s. When you couldn’t walk into a cafe without encountering Dalí, Picasso or Joyce, with a plate of sauerkraut, or a glass of absinthe. “You are in love with a fantasy,” explains Inez. “I’m in love with you,” he tells her emphatically.

What helps to be swept up in Gil’s world of experience, in addition to the alluring appearance of the film, is the cast around him. Watch Rachel McAdam’s white sobriety collide with sultry moth Marion Cotillard. How he crosses swords with his Republican father-in-law (Kurt Fuller) during the day and, purely out of irritation, goes against the claims of insufferable know-it-all Paul (Michael Sheen). The scourge even dares to go against Carla Bruni. Maybe it’s because his wife Carol (Nina Arianda) has listened to ‘Stand by your man’ just one too many times. Things get even better when nighttime arrives and Gil is allowed to exchange this and that with Henri de Tolouse-Lautrec in Maxim’s restaurant or put his literary aspirations in the hands of Gertrude Stein – mother hen Kathy Bates can’t help but be her reincarnation. With that constellation, ‘Midnight in Paris’ becomes a fiery spectacle: everything used to be better!

However, this film is about more than the picture accompanying that statement. Woody Allen uses the power of the oh-so-human longing for the past not only as a musky scent. He also dwells on the fact itself. ‘Midnight in Paris’ is like an enchanting musical musical chairs from illustrious eras. As a viewer, you may be anxiously wondering when the music will stop. Nevertheless, it is still nice to be able to experience that, nowadays.